Unnatural Exposure

Chapter Eleven

Later that morning I left in a taxi as the sun was getting high in the clouds. I had nothing but the clothes on my back, all of which had been sterilized in the autoclave or gassed. I was in a hurry, and guarding a large white cardboard box printed with PERISHABLE RUSH! RUSH! and IMPORTANT KEEP UPRIGHT and other big blue warnings.

Like a Chinese puzzle, my package was boxes within boxes containing BioPacks. Inside these were Bio-tubes of Lila Pruitt's liver, spleen and spinal fluid, protected by fiber-board shields, and bubble and corrugated wrap. All of it was packed in dry ice with INFECTIOUS SUBSTANCE and DANGER stickers warning anyone who got beyond the first layer. Obviously, I could not let my cargo out of sight. In addition to its well-proven hazard, it could be evidence should it turn out that Pruitt was a homicide. At the Baltimore-Washington International airport, I found a pay phone and called Rose.

'USAMRIID has my medical bag and microscope: I didn't waste time. 'See what you can do about getting them shipped overnight. I'm at BWI, en route to CDC.'

'I've been trying to page you,' she said.

'Maybe they can return that to me, too.' I tried to remember what else I was missing.

'And the phone,' I added.

'You got a report back that you might find interesting. The animal hairs that turned up with the torso. Rabbit and monkey hairs.'

'Bizarre,' was the only thing I could think to say.

'I hate to tell you this news. The media's been calling about the Carrie Grethen case. Apparently, something's been leaked.'

'Goddamn it!' I exclaimed as I thought about Ring.

'What do you want me to do?' she asked.

'How about calling Benton. I don't know what to say. I'm a little overwhelmed.'

'You sound that way.'

I looked at my watch. 'Rose, I've got to go fight my way on a plane. They didn't want to let me through X-ray, and I know what's going to happen when I try to board with this thing.'

It was exactly what I expected. When I walked into the cabin, a flight attendant took one look and smiled.

'Here.' She held out her hands. 'Let me put this in baggage for you.'

'It's got to stay with me,' I said.

'It won't fit in an overhead rack or under your seat, ma'am.' Her smile got tight, the line behind me getting longer.

'Can we discuss this out of traffic?' I said, moving into the kitchen.

She was right next to me, hovering close. 'Ma'am, this flight is overbooked. We simply don't have room.'

'Here,' I said, showing her the paperwork.

Her eyes scanned the red-bordered Declaration For Dangerous Goods, and froze halfway down a column where it was typed that I was transporting 'Infectious substances affecting humans.' She glanced nervously around the kitchen and moved me closer to the rest rooms.

'Regulations require that only a trained person can handle dangerous goods like these,' I reasonably explained. 'So it has to stay with me.'

'What is it?' she whispered, her eyes round.

'Autopsy specimens.'

'Mother of God.'

She immediately grabbed her seating chart. Soon after, I was escorted to an empty row in first class, near the back. 'Just put it on the seat next to you. It's not going to leak or anything?' she asked.

'I'll guard it with my life,' I promised.

'We should have a lot of vacancies up here unless a bunch of people upgrade. But don't you worry. I'll steer everyone.' She motioned with her arms, as if she were driving.

No one came near me or my box. I drank coffee during a very peaceful flight to Atlanta, feeling naked without my pager or phone, but overjoyed to be on my own. In the Atlanta airport, I took one moving sidewalk and escalator after another, traveling what seemed miles, before I got outside and found a taxi.

We followed 85 North to Druid Hills Road, where soon we were passing pawnshops and auto rentals, then vast jungles of poison oak and kudzu, and strip malls. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention was in the midst of the parking decks and parking lots of Emory University. Across the street from the American Cancer Society, CDC was six floors of tan brick trimmed with gray. I checked in at a desk that had guards and closed circuit TV.

'This is going to Bio Level 4, where I'm meeting Dr Bret Martin in the atrium,' I

explained.

'Ma'am, you'll need an escort,' one of the guards said.

'Good,' I said as he reached for the phone. 'I always get lost.'

I followed him to the back of the building, where the facility was new and under intense surveillance. There were cameras everywhere, the glass bulletproof, and corridors were catwalks with grated floors. We passed bacteria and influenza labs, and the red brick and concrete area for rabies and AIDS.

'This is impressive,' I said, for I had not been here in several years.

'Yeah, it is. They got all the security you might want. Cameras, motion detectors at all exits and entrances. All the trash is boiled and burned, and they use these filters for the air so anything that comes in is killed. Except the scientists.' He laughed as he used a card key to open a door. 'So what bad news you carrying in?'

'That's what I'm here to find out,' I said, and we were in the atrium now.

BL-4 was really nothing more than a huge laminar flow hood with thick walls of concrete and steel. It was a building within a building, its windows covered with blinds. Labs were behind thick walls of glass, and the only blue-suited scientists working this furloughed day were those who had cared enough to come in anyway.

'This thing with the government,' the guard was saying as he shook his head. 'What they think? These diseases like Ebola gonna wait until the budget gets straight?' He shook his head some more.

He escorted me past containment rooms that were dark, and labs with no one in them, then empty rabbit cages in a corridor and rooms for large primates. A monkey looked at me through bars and glass, his eyes so human they unnerved me, and I thought of what Rose had said. Deadoc had transferred monkey and rabbit hairs to a victim I knew he had touched. He might work in a place like this.

'They throw waste at you,' the guard said as we walked on. 'Same thing their animal rights activists do. Kinda fits, don't you think?'

My anxiety was getting stronger.

'Where are we going?' I asked.

'Where the good doctor told me to bring you, ma'am,' he said, and we were on another level of catwalk now, heading into another part of the building.

We passed through a door, where Revco ultra low temperature freezers looked like computers the size of large copying machines. They were locked and out of place in this corridor, where a heavy man in a lab coat was waiting for me. He had baby-fine blond hair, and was perspiring.

'I'm Bret Martin,' he said, offering me his hand. 'Thanks.' He nodded at the guard, indicating he was dismissed.

I handed Martin my cardboard box.

'This is where we keep our smallpox stock,' he said, nodding at the freezers as he set my box on top of one of them. 'Locked up at seventy degrees centigrade below zero. What can I say?' He shrugged. 'These freezers are out in the hall because we have no room anyplace else in maximum containment. Rather coincidental you should give this to me. Not that I'm expecting your disease to be the same.'

'All of this is smallpox?' I asked, amazed as I looked around.

'Not all, and not for long, though, since for the first time ever on this planet we've made a conscious decision to eliminate a species.'

'The irony,' I said. 'When the species you're talking about has eliminated millions.'

'So you think we should just take all this source disease and autoclave it.'

His expression said what I was used to hearing. Life was much more complicated than

I presented it, and only people like him recognized the subtler shades.

'I'm not saying we should destroy anything,' I replied. 'Not at all. Actually, probably we shouldn't. Because of this.' I looked at the box I had just given him. 'Our autoclaving smallpox certainly won't mean it's gone. I guess it's like any other weapon.'

'You and me both. I'd sure like to know where the Russians are hiding their variola stock virus these days, and if they've sold any of it to the Middle East, North Korea.'

'You'll do PCR on this?' I said.

'Yes.'

'Right away?'

'As fast as we can.'

'Please,' I said. 'This is an emergency.'

'That's why I'm standing here now,' he said. 'The government considers me nonessential. I should be at home.'

'I've got photographs that USAMRIID was kind enough to develop while I was in the

Slammer,' I said with a trace of irony.

'I want to see them.'

We took the elevator back up, getting off on the fourth floor. He led me into a conference room where staff met to devise strategies against terrible scourges they couldn't always identify. Usually bacteriologists, epidemiologists, people in charge of quarantines, communications, special pathogens and PCR assembled in the room. But it was quiet, no one was here but us.

'Right now,' Martin said, 'I'm all you've got.'

I got a thick envelope out of my purse, and he began to go through the photographs. For a moment, he stared as if transfixed, at color prints of the torso and those of Lila Pruitt.

'Good God,' he said. 'I think we should look at transpiration routes right away. Everybody who might have had contact. And I mean, fast.'

'We can do that on Tangier,' I said. 'Maybe.'

'Definitely not chicken pox or measles. No way, Jose,' he said. 'Definitely pox- related.'

He went through photographs of the severed hands and feet, his eyes wide.

'Wow.' He stared without blinking, light reflecting on his glasses. 'What the hell is this?'

'He calls himself deadoc,' I said. 'He sent me graphic files through AOL. Anonymously, of course. The FBI's trying to track him.'

'And this victim here, he dismembered?' I nodded.

'She also has manifestations similar to the victim on Tangier.' He was looking at vesicles on the torso.

'So far, yes.'

'You know, monkeypox has been worrying me for years,' he said. 'We survey the hell out of West Africa, from Zaire to Sierra Leone, where cases have occurred, along with whitepox. But so far, no variola virus has turned up. My fear, though, is that one of these days, some poxvirus in the animal kingdom is going to figure out a way to infect people.'

Again, I thought about my telephone conversation with Rose, about murder and animal hairs.

'All that's got to happen is the microorganism gets in the air, let's say, and finds a susceptible host.'

He went back to Lila Pruitt, to her disfigured, tormented body on her foul bed.

'Now she was obviously exposed to enough virus to cause devastating disease,' he said, and he was so engrossed, he seemed to be talking to himself.

'Dr Martin,' I said. 'Do monkeys get monkeypox or are they just the carrier?'

'They get it and they give it where there is animal contact, such as in the rain forests

of Africa. There are nine known virulent poxviruses on this planet and transmission to humans happens only in two. The variola virus, or smallpox, which, thank God, we don't see anymore, and molluscum contagiosum.'

'Trace evidence clinging to the torso has been identified as monkey hair.' He turned to look at me and frowned. 'What?'

'And rabbit hair, too. I'm just wondering if someone out there is conducting their own laboratory experiments.'

He got up from the table.

'We'll start on this now. Where can you be reached?'

'Back in Richmond.' I handed him my card as we walked out of the conference room.

'Could someone maybe call for a taxi?'

'Sure. One of the guards at the desk. Afraid none of the clerical staff is in.'

Carrying the box, he pushed the elevator button with his elbow. 'It's a nightmare. We got salmonella in Orlando from unpasteurized orange juice, another potential cruise ship outbreak of E. coli O-one-five-seven-H-seven, probably undercooked ground beef again. Botulism in Rhode Island, and some respiratory disease in an old folks' home. And Congress doesn't want to fund us.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

We stopped at each floor, waiting as other people got on. Martin kept talking.

'Imagine this,' he went on. 'A resort in Iowa where we've got suspected shigella because a lot of rain overflowed in private wells. And try to get the EPA involved.'

'It's called mission impossible,' someone sardonically said as the doors opened again.

'If they even exist anymore,' Martin quipped. 'We get fourteen thousand calls a year and have only two operators. Actually, right now we got none. Anybody who comes in, answers the phone. Including me.'

'Please don't let this wait,' I said as we reached the lobby.

'Don't worry.' He was into it. 'I got three guys I'm calling in from home right away.'

For half an hour, I waited in the lobby and used a phone, and at last my taxi was here. I rode in silence, staring out at plazas of polished granite and marble, and sports complexes that reminded me of the Olympics, and buildings of silver and glass. Atlanta was a city where everything aspired higher, and lavish fountains seemed a symbol of generosity and no fear. I was feeling light-headed and chilled and unusually tired for one who had just spent the better part of a week in bed. By the time I reached my Delta gate, my back had begun to ache. I could not get warm or think very clearly, and I knew I had a fever.

I was ill by the time I reached Richmond. When Marino met me at the gate, the expression on his face turned to abject fear.

'Geez, Doc,' he said. 'You look like hell.'

'I feel like hell.'

'You got any bags?'

'No. You got any news?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'One tidbit that will piss you off. Ring arrested Keith Pleasants last night.'

'For what?' I exclaimed as I coughed.

'Attempting to elude. Supposedly, Ring was following him out of the landfill after work and tried to pull him for speeding. Supposedly, Pleasants wouldn't stop. So he's in jail, bond set at five grand, if you can believe that. He ain't going nowhere anytime soon.'

'Harassment.' I blew my nose. 'Ring is picking on him. Picking on Lucy. Picking on me.'

'No kidding. Maybe you should've stayed in Maryland, in bed,' he said as we boarded the escalator. 'No offense, but I ain't gonna catch this, am I?'

Marino was terrified of anything he could not see, whether it was radiation or a virus.

'I don't know what I've got,' I said. 'Maybe the flu.'

'Last time I got that I was out for two weeks.' His pace slowed, so he did not keep up with me. 'Plus, you been around other things.'

'Then don't come close, touch or kiss me,' I said, shortly.

'Hey, don't worry.'

This continued as we walked out into the cold afternoon.

'Look. I'm going to take a taxi home,' I said and I was so mad at him I was next to tears.

'I don't want you doing that.' Marino looked frightened and was jumpy.

I waved in the air, swallowing hard and hiding my face as a Blue Bird cab veered toward me.

'You don't need the flu. Rose doesn't need it. No one needs it,' I said, furiously. 'You know, I'm almost out of cash. This is awful. Look at my suit. You think an autoclave presses anything and leaves a pleasant smell? The hell with my hose. I got no coat, no gloves. Here I am, and it's what?' I yanked open the back door of a cab that was Carolina blue. 'Thirty degrees?'

Marino stared at me as I got in. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill, careful his fingers did not brush mine.

'You need anything at the store?' he called out as I drove off.

My throat and eyes swelled with tears. Digging tissues out of my purse, I blew my nose and quietly wept.

'Don't mean to bug ya, lady,' said my driver, a portly old man. 'But where are we going?'

'Windsor Farms. I'll show you when we get there,' I choked as I said.

'Fights.' He shook his head. 'Dontcha hate'em? I 'member one time me and the wife got to arguing in one these all-you-can-eat fish camps. She takes the car. Me, I take a hike. Five miles home through a bad part of town.'

He was nodding, eyeing me in the rearview mirror as he assumed that Marino and I

were having a lovers' quarrel.

'So, you're married to a cop?' he then said. 'I saw him drive in. Not an unmarked car on the road that can fool this guy.' He thumped his chest.

My head was splitting, my face burning. I settled back in the seat and shut my eyes while he droned on about an earlier life in Philadelphia, and his hopes that this winter would not bring much snow. I settled into a feverish sleep. When I awoke, I did not know where I was.

'Ma'am. Ma'am. We're here,' the driver was saying loudly to wake me up. 'Where to next?'

He had just turned onto Canterbury and was sitting at a stop sign.

'Up here, take a right on Dover,' I replied.

I directed him into my neighborhood, the look on his face increasingly baffled as he drove past Georgian and Tudor estates behind walls in the city's wealthiest neighborhood. When he stopped at my front door, he stared at fieldstone, at the wooded land around my home, and he watched me closely as I climbed out.

'Don't worry,' he said as I handed him a twenty and told him to keep the change. 'I

seen it all lady, and never say nothing.' He zipped his lips, winking at me. I was a rich man's wife having a tempestuous affair with a detective.

'A good credo,' I said, coughing.

The burglar alarm welcomed me with its warning beep, and never in my life had I been more relieved to be home. I wasted no time getting out of my scalded clothes, and straight into a hot shower, where I inhaled steam and tried to clear the rattle from my lungs. When I was wrapping up in a thick terry cloth robe, the telephone rang. It was exactly four P.M.

'Dr Scarpetta?' It was Fielding.

'I just got home,' I said.

'You don't sound good.'

'I'm not.'

'Well, my news isn't going to help,' he said. 'They've got possibly two more cases on

Tangier.'

'Oh no,' I said.

'A mother and daughter. Fever of a hundred and five, a rash. CDC's deployed a team with bed isolators, the whole nine yards.'

'How's Wingo?' I asked.

He paused, as if puzzled. 'Fine. Why?'

'He helped with the torso,' I reminded him.

'Oh yeah. Well, he's the same as always.' Relieved, I sat down and shut my eyes.

'What's going on with the samples you took to Atlanta?' Fielding asked.

'They're doing tests, I hope, with what few people they can muster now.'

'So we still don't know what this is.'

'Jack, everything points to smallpox,' I said to him. 'That's the way it looks so far.'

'I've never seen it. Have you?'

'Not before now. Maybe leprosy is worse. It's bad enough to die of a disease, but to be disfigured in the process is cruel.' I coughed again and was very thirsty. 'I'll see you in the morning, and we'll figure out what we're going to do.'

'It doesn't sound to me like you should be going anywhere.'

'You're absolutely right. And I don't have a choice.'

I hung up and tried Bret Martin at CDC, but his phone was answered by voice mail, and he did not call me back. I also left a message for Fujitsubo, but he did not return my call, either, and I figured he was at home, like most of his colleagues. The budget war raged on.

'Damn,' I swore as I put a kettle of water on the stove and dug in a cupboard for tea.

'Damn, damn, damn.'

It was not quite five when I called Wesley. At Quantico, at least, people were still working.

'Thank God someone is answering the phones somewhere,' I blurted out to his secretary.

'They haven't figured out how nonessential I am yet,' she said.

'Is he in?' I asked.

Wesley got on the phone, and sounded so energetic and cheery that it instantly got on my nerves.

'You have no right to feel this good,' I said.

'You have the flu.'

'I don't know what I've got.'

'That's what it is, right?' He was worried and his mood went bad.

'I don't know. We can only assume.'

'I don't mean to be an alarmist…'

'Then don't,' I cut him off.

'Kay,' his voice was firm. 'You've got to face this. What if it's not?' I said nothing because I could not bear to think such thoughts.

'Please,' he said. 'Don't blow this off. Don't pretend it's nothing like you do with most things in your life.'

'Now you're making me mad,' I snapped. 'I fly into this goddamn airport and Marino doesn't want me in his car so I take a taxi and the driver thinks we're having an affair and my rich husband doesn't know, and all the while I have a fever and hurt like hell and just want to go home.'

'The taxi driver thinks you're having an affair?'

'Just forget it.'

'How do you know you've got the flu? That it's not something else?'

'I don't have a rash. Is that what you want to hear?'

There was a long silence. Then he said, 'What if you get one?'

'Then I'm probably going to die, Benton.' I coughed again. 'You'll probably never touch me again. And I'd never want you to see me again, if it goes its course. It's easier to worry about stalkers, serial killers, people you can blow away with a gun. But the invisible ones are who I've always feared. They take you on a sunny day in a public place. They slide in with your lemonade. I've been vaccinated for hepatitis B. But that's just one killer in a huge population. What about tuberculosis and HIV, and Hanta and Ebola? What about this? God.' I took a deep breath. 'It started with a torso and I did not know.'

'I heard about the two new cases,' he said, and his voice had gotten quiet and gentle. 'I

can be there in two hours. Do you want to see me?'

'Right now I don't want to see anyone.'

'Doesn't matter. I'm on my way.'

'Benton,' I said, 'don't.'

But he had his mind made up, and when he pulled into my driveway in his throaty

BMW, it was almost midnight. I met him at the door, and we did not touch.

'Let's sit in front of the fire,' he said.

We did, and he was kind enough to make me another cup of decaffeinated tea. I sat on the couch, he was in a side chair, and flames fed by gas enveloped an artificial log. I had turned the lights low.

'I don't doubt your theory,' he said as he lingered over cognac.

'Maybe tomorrow, we'll know more.' I was perspiring as I shivered, staring into the fire.

'Right now I don't give a shit about any of that.' He looked fiercely at me.

'You have to give a shit about that.' I wiped my brow with a sleeve.

'No.'

I was silent as he stared at me.

'What I care about is you,' he said. Still, I did not respond.

'Kay.' He gripped my arm.

'Don't touch me, Benton.' I shut my eyes. 'Don't. I don't want you sick, too.'

'See, and that's convenient for you. To be sick. And I can't touch you. And you the noble doctor caring more about my well-being than your own.'

I was quiet, determined not to cry.

'Convenient. You want to be sick right now so nobody can get close. Marino won't even give you a ride home. And I can't put my hands on you. And Lucy won't see you and a Janet has to talk to you behind glass.'

'What is your point?' I looked at him.

'Functional illness.'

'Oh. I guess you studied that in school. Maybe during your master's in psychology or something.'

'Don't make fun of me.'

'I never have.'

I could feel his hurt as I turned my face to the fire, my eyes closed tight.

'Kay. Don't you die on me.' I did not speak.

'Don't you dare.' His voice shook. 'Don't you dare!'

'You won't get off the hook that easy,' I said, getting out of my chair. 'Let's go to bed.' He slept in the room where Lucy usually stayed, and I was up most of the night coughing and trying to get comfortable, which simply was not possible. The next morning at half past six he was up, and coffee was brewing when I walked into the kitchen. Light filtered through trees beyond windows, and I could tell by the tight curl of rhododendron leaves that it was bitterly cold.

'I'm cooking,' Wesley announced. 'What will it be?'

'I don't think I can.' I was weak, and when I coughed, it felt as if my lungs were ripping.

'Obviously, you are worse.' Concern flickered in his eyes. 'You should go to a doctor.'

'I am a doctor, and it's too soon to go to one.'

I took aspirin, decongestants and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C. I ate a bagel and was beginning to feel almost human when Rose called and ruined me.

'Dr Scarpetta? The mother from Tangier died early this morning.'

'Oh God no.' I was sitting at the kitchen table and running my fingers through my hair.

'What about the daughter?'

'Condition's serious. Or at least it was several hours ago.'

'And the body?'

Wesley was behind me, rubbing my sore shoulders and neck.

'No one's moved it yet. No one's sure what to do, and the Baltimore Medical

Examiner's Office has been trying to reach you. So has CDC.'

'Who at CDC?' I asked.

'A Dr Martin.'

'I need to call him first, Rose. Meanwhile, you get hold of Baltimore and tell them that under no circumstances are they to have that body sent into their morgue until they've heard from me. What is Dr Martin's number?'

She gave it to me and I dialed it immediately. He answered on the first ring and sounded keyed up.

'We did PCR on the samples you brought in. Three primers and two of them match with smallpox, but one of them didn't.'

'Then is it smallpox or not?'

'We ran its genomic sequence, and it doesn't match up with any poxvirus in any reference lab in the world. Dr Scarpetta, I believe you got a virus that's a mutant.'

'Meaning, the smallpox vaccination isn't going to work,' I said as my heart seemed to drop right out of me.

'All we can do is test in the animal lab. We're talking at least a week before we know and can even begin thinking about a new vaccine. For practical purposes, we're calling this smallpox, but we really don't know what the hell it is. I'll also remind you we've been working on an AIDS vaccine since I986 and are no closer now than we were back then.'

'Tangier Island needs to be quarantined immediately. ' We've got to contain this,' I

exclaimed, alarmed to the edge of panic.

'Believe me, we know. We're getting a team together right now and will mobilize the

Coast Guard.'

I hung up and was frantic when I said to Wesley, 'I've got to go. We've got an outbreak of something no one's ever heard of. It's already killed at least two people. Maybe three. Maybe four.'

He was following me down the hall as I talked.

'It's smallpox but not smallpox. We've got to find out how it's being transmitted. Did Lila Pruitt know the mother who just died? Did they have any contact at all, or did the daughter? Did they even live near each other? What about the water supply? A water tower. Blue. I remember seeing one.'

I was getting dressed. Wesley stood in the doorway, his face almost gray and like stone.

'You're going to go back out there,' he said.

'I need to get downtown first.' I looked at him.

'I'll drive,' he said.